Senior Backend Engineer

Carbon Health; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first

USD salary

Private health insurance

Independent, permanent role

Office access in Ankara (ODTÜ Teknoket

Job summary

Carbon Health is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to design, build, and own reliable JVM-based services used in real clinical workflows. You will work on API design, event-driven patterns, and production-grade infrastructure, with a focus on reliability and data integrity.

The role involves collaborating with product and engineering teams, ensuring observability, and applying AI to improve development workflows. Remote-first with opportunities to visit Türkiye offices as needed.

Qualifications

• Experience building and operating backend systems in production.
• Hands-on with JVM languages (Java, Kotlin, or Scala).
• Experience with gRPC for service-to-service communication.
• Designing production-grade APIs with REST and GraphQL.
• Event-driven architectures and message queues.
• Relational database design, indexing, and query performance.
• Terraform-based cloud infrastructure management (AWS preferred).
• Observability, incident response, and root-cause analysis.
• Strong problem-solving and ownership in engineering decisions.
• Ability to work independently and communicate clearly in English.
• Interest in using AI to improve development workflows.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and own JVM backend services from design to production.
• Implement service-to-service communication with gRPC, including retries and timeouts.
• Design public/internal APIs (REST, GraphQL).
• Build event-driven and asynchronous workflows with consistency guarantees.
• Own infrastructure with Terraform and CI/CD pipelines.
• Make services observable with metrics, logging, and tracing.
• Model data and optimize queries to maintain performance as data grows.
• Handle sensitive healthcare data with access controls and auditing.
• Write maintainable, well-tested code and mentor teammates.
• Collaborate with product and design to deliver features on time.

Skills

Java

Kotlin

Scala

gRPC

REST API design

GraphQL

Event-driven architecture

Relational databases

Terraform

AWS

Observability / Monitoring

English proficiency

AI in software development

Job description

About the role

We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer who enjoys building reliable, scalable services that real clinical workflows depend on. You'll design and own backend systems, APIs, and the event-driven infrastructure that connects them.

This is a hands-on engineering role for someone who can take a service from technical design to production, make pragmatic decisions, and collaborate effectively with product and engineering teams.

You'll work with modern JVM technologies, AWS, and event-driven systems in a healthcare technology environment where reliability, data integrity, and delivery matter.

What you'll do

• Design, build, and own JVM backend services (Java, Kotlin, or Scala) from technical design through production.
• Build reliable service-to-service communication with gRPC: well-defined contracts, deadlines and timeouts, retries with backoff, idempotent operations, and graceful degradation when a dependency fails.
• Design public and internal APIs (REST, GraphQL)
• Build event-driven and asynchronous workflows that stay consistent under failure, using patterns such as idempotent consumers, dead-letter handling, Saga, and Transactional Outbox.
• Own the infrastructure your services run on: define and evolve it with Terraform, review infrastructure changes like application code, and ship through automated CI/CD pipelines.
• Make services observable with metrics, structured logging, distributed tracing, and alerting tied to service-level objectives.
• Model data and tune queries in relational databases so performance stays predictable as data grows.
• Handle sensitive healthcare data responsibly through access control, encryption, and audit trails.
• Write maintainable, well-tested code, lead technical design discussions, and help raise the bar through reviews and mentoring.
• Use AI effectively to improve development workflows, from exploration and implementation to testing, debugging, and documentation.
• Collaborate with product, design, and engineering teams to deliver features on time.

Qualifications

• Strong professional experience building and operating backend systems in production.
• Solid experience with the JVM ecosystem: Java, Kotlin, or Scala.
• Hands-on experience with gRPC or a similar RPC framework for service-to-service communication, including timeouts, retries, and failure handling.
• Experience designing production-grade APIs with REST and GraphQL.
• Experience with event-driven architecture and message queues, and with the delivery and consistency challenges that come with them.
• Solid relational database experience: schema design, indexing, and query performance.
• Hands-on experience managing cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred) with Terraform.
• Experience running services in production: observability, incident response, and root-cause analysis.
• Strong problem-solving skills and a pragmatic approach to engineering decisions.
• Ability to work independently, communicate clearly, and take ownership of deliverables.
• Professional working proficiency in English, both written and verbal.
• A strong interest in using AI efficiently and responsibly in software development.

Nice to have

• Experience in healthcare technology or other highly regulated industries.
• Experience with healthcare data standards such as HL7 or FHIR.
• Experience with resilience patterns such as circuit breakers, bulkheads, and rate limiting.
• Experience with stream processing or change data capture.
• Experience with containers and container orchestration.
• Some frontend familiarity to collaborate smoothly across the stack.
• Experience contributing to technical architecture and mentoring other engineers.

What we offer

• Remote-first, full-time, permanent employment in Türkiye.
• Salary paid in USD, net.
• Payroll employment with the benefits of a permanent position.
• Access to our office at ODTÜ Teknokent, Ankara, with regular visits according to planned schedules.
• 100% private health insurance coverage for the employee.
• 50% private health insurance coverage for eligible family members, if you choose to include them.
• Floating vacation days: when a public holiday falls on a weekend, you can take the corresponding day off on a weekday of your choice, subject to applicable policies.
• The opportunity to work on meaningful healthcare technology products with a collaborative engineering team.
• A culture that values ownership, continuous learning, and delivering high-quality software.